Singaporean dictator Lee Kuan Yew died

Whilst being the most backward first-world country is better not being a first-world country at all, he and the government have not made steps to make the society progress anywhere beyond the most basic level of living needs.

Economic development is important, but having nothing but only economic development is bad, especially when it's not mutually exclusive to have economic development and freedom (USA), or cultural development (UK), or creativity (Japan), or a functional legal system (most first-world countries), and many other things.

To compare Singapore with its closest rival, Hong Kong, it is not that impressive of a success story. Economically both cities are developed more or less the same, but HK dominated East Asia culturally, has an independent juridical system, a lot more liberal legally, has actual freedom, and has a more functional democracy despite its system being more restrictive than SG's - all these despite not being an English-speaking country and under Chinese rule.



And stopped there. You can argue that you need to be tough in the beginning before you could let it grow itself, just like military rule right after a chaos, but not for forever.



Because he didn't need to. The court always ruled in favour of him.



His time in office is irrelevant but until now it's still in his son's hand. What is this? A monarchy?

You can run an opposing party, but nobody, including the opposing party, has the freedom to actually say anything against anyone.



And you cannot. In Singapore, no-one is allowed to say anything bad about anyone.

Also, it's still illegal to be gay.

Well there's has only been 3 Singapore PMs (a very small sample), however;

Ideas shouldn't become dogma, regardless of where its from.

You have missed the point. I am not saying that Singapore's current and historical PMs are sub-average or malicious; I am saying that Singapore's institutions are poorly equipped to remove such a person in the future. Since the PM position also seems to be becoming hereditary, they are perhaps also poorly equipped to prevent such a person taking up the position.

A country with a compliant population governed by LKY is probably better governed than the same country governed by the run of British or French heads of government in the same period. However, Britain and France are much less likely to be stuck with a monster who can't be removed.

Bad government is not something that only happens when institutions fail. It is inevitable everywhere. How much a system limits the damage bad government can do is perhaps more important than how much it enables good government to do.


The view that LKY's rule will be perpetuated forever is itself a dogma. Democracy may be foundationally dogmatic but it is not functionally dogmatic. It is very easy for a democratic society to change - that is the whole point.

As I argued previously, the restrictions on political activity in Singapore could imo be strongly justified when the opposition was an openly communist movement. Today, free competition is likely to result in two parties that look very much like the PAP and would compete on competence and honesty rather than basic values. It would not radically change the ideological trajectory of the country but would make that trajectory much less dependent on the decisions and virtues of a handful of individuals.